Leading British Supermarket

How a Leading British Supermarket Utilised Store Data to Personalise the Customer Experience

THE CUSTOMER

This customer is a brand of British supermarkets, selling groceries as part of Britain’s largest employee-owned retailer. They have 335 shops across the United Kingdom, including 65 convenience shops, and a 5.1% share of the market, making it the eighth-largest retailer of groceries in the UK. They also export products to 52 countries and have locations in the Middle East.

THE CHALLENGE

This leading UK grocer had two main challenges – they wanted to be able to identify their customers who purchase both online and in store so that highly targeted marketing campaigns could be driven from their chosen platform (GA), and they wanted a comprehensive attribution report to show ROI back to their 3rd party advertisers.

Although this high street grocer had volumes of customer data, they had no way of consolidating and cross-matching that data to give them a single customer view in order to replicate the same exceptional personalised service in store, online and vice versa. The client wanted the granularity of seeing right from the basket, to the home across both online and in store.

THE SOLUTION

Appsbroker conducted a full audit of data sources and identified two main sources of truth – the in store basket data and the online customer coded data. The key challenge was to be able to process data stitching significantly faster than the previous manual approach.

Appsbroker created a secure encrypted data ingestion pipeline to process all daily in store transactions into BigQuery and join together with online shopper IDs. The matched shopper ID baskets are sent into Google Analytics via the GAMP (Google Analytics Measurement Protocol) API. Once this data is inside the dedicated GA property the marketing teams can build targeted campaigns.

THE BENEFITS

The customer can now see the entire customer journey whether online or in store and provide a completely personalised experience on an individual basis across any channel. This includes anything from product recommendations and relevant offers, to price promotions and marketing campaigns.

For 3rd party suppliers the customer can now give full accountability for the advertising and product placement spend across online and on-store and give exact analytics on campaign success regardless of channel.

The predominantly online grocer has now successfully transformed their business into a leading omni-channel grocer without compromising on the personalised customer experience.

THE RESULTS

• Online orders have scaled from an average of 10,000 per week to 175,000 per week – the solution has scaled easily with the influx of data.
• Within 24 hours the customer can now see a customer that has seen a product promotion online or in store and has completed a sale on the opposite channel, giving a much richer insight into the success of campaigns omni-channel.
• The customer now has the confidence that they are targeting the right message to the newly born online audience, creating a similar and reassuring experience that they are used to in store.

Targeted campaigns have increased online orders per week by a factor of 10 and the solution has automatically scaled to service these demands.

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